Creating users from Python

The ability to create users is obviously an administrative task. By default, this means that one must log in as root, or any other user who has administrative rights, to use them. If your Python program does not login as root, it will not be able to affect user creation. Therefore, one's connection credentials must read accordingly:

import MySQLdb
mydb = MySQLdb.connect(host = 'localhost', 
                       user = 'root', 
                       passwd = 'rootsecret')
cursor = mydb.cursor()

From here, one can similarly form the statement to the other CREATE statements that we have used.

statement = """CREATE USER 'exemplar'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'MoreSecurity'"""
cursor.execute(statement)

In a Python shell, passing the statement through cursor.execute() will return 0L. If you execute this code in a Python program file, you will not get such feedback (unless you overtly tell Python to print it). But for debugging purposes, you have two choices: check the MySQL...